Despite the current economic and financial situation, the Credit Crunch, and other scary monsters, investment in online advertising and marketing campaigns is still rising in 2009, and analysts consider that it is likely to continue to do so in the foreseeable future, for one main reason: marketers are starting to spend more on Internet ads, and less on ads in traditional media. According to the Spanish Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB, http://www.iabspain.net) the investment in online media in Spain has risen up to Euros 139,55 millions during the first quarter of 2009, which implies a growth of 3.6% in respect of the same period in 2008. Other analysts project that the online share of ad revenues will continue to grow in the US to slightly more than 15% of the total ad share in 2013. Meanwhile, in the UK, spending on online ads has already overtaken advertising on newspapers, TV and other traditional media, accounting for 19% of all advertising.
Additionally to other arguments which explain the growth of digital marketing, such as the shifts in the media landscape due to the changing of usage patterns, the development of new technologies, the expansion of broadband Internet connections and multimedia wireless devices (PDAs, Smartphones), or the opportunity for advertisers to reach millions of people on a global scale, the current circumstances makes cash-conscious companies to look for alternative tools to be more efficient in their marketing campaigns. In this respect, digital marketing offers compelling benefits, as marketers can more readily measure the results of Internet advertising than with traditional media, producing more efficient advertising and higher ROI.
The increase of online advertising, in search for more efficient campaigns, probably shares with the progress of Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 technologies, the main responsibility for the introduction of new formats and types of online advertising. All together, the increase of online campaigns, and the introduction of new formats (notwithstanding the challenges arising from the ‘more traditional’ online marketing campaigns) imply the arrival of new challenges in different fronts, including the legal one. New trends, new challenges.
From the legal point of view, online advertising campaigns (and each different online advertising format, product and service) raise particular issues that specialized lawyers must deal with, on a proactive basis. Serving this post as an introduction, in new posts I will analyze some of the most relevant legal issues arising from digital advertising and online marketing campaigns.
As an example, among others, we can highlight the following legal matters in relation to online advertising: providing compulsory legal information (e.g. pursuant to consumers protection regulations that forbid misleading or false advertising); complying with the particular advertising regime for certain products (such as gambling, alcohol, tobacco); gathering consent from consumers (in Spain and in the EU, in general, opt-in –previous consent- is required for sending commercial communications) and other personal data protection issues; dealing with intellectual property issues (e.g. trademarks rights versus contextualized ads, sponsored links and search engines –e.g. what to do against keyword spamming-; or inserting ads in user-generated content); defamation and viral marketing campaigns; co-location of ads in games and applications (product placement); legal issues arising from advertising analytics and audience measurement; dealing with click frauds; or defining the liability for each actor of a marketing campaign (advertisers, agencies, content/service providers, analytics companies and network operators).